A Christmas Different

by Tara Hurford, IWM serving in Santa Fe, Mexico City, Mexico.

I feel very blessed and privileged to have had the opportunity to celebrate a Mexican Christmas season.  Let me paint a bit of a picture for you. 
The start of Advent brought the traditional wreath and a stunningly beautiful, larger than life, papier-maché nativity scene complete with donkey and heralding angel to the humble Asuncion parish alter, hand-made by a local man who makes piñatas down the way.  For the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the city buses paraded up Vasco de Quiroga (our main street) in an hour-long procession, honking the tune of ¨Jingle Bells¨ and donning the sacred image, along with wild and beautiful Christmas decorations and youth throwing candy from the sun roofs. Gregorio Lopez, a local parish group, re-created the Guadalupana image on the cold courtyard blocks of the parish with colored sawdust on the eve of celebration of the appearance of our mixed-race Mother to the now famous indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, after more than a week of pilgrimage with her statue to homes in the little pueblo.  Then came the Posadas, with the walks and turns around courtyards to imitate the long journey to Bethlehem and begging for a place to stay at the ¨posada¨ for the Holy Family, ponche and piñatas.  Christmas Eve was an experience in and of itself with the parish grounds literally flooded with people for seven straight hours - spanning four masses - and the presence of hundreds of baby Jesus sculptures to be rocked to sleep, blessed and kissed to return home to their respective nativities for another year.  Then after the eleven o´clock mass, we feasted, far away from everything I usually associate with Christmas -- my family, friends, snow, spruce trees, and presents.  I found a new type of peace amidst people I have only known for a few months.

But the Christmas season also brought me to some rather sobering social reflections, and here I would like to some fragments with you.  About a week or so into Advent, I had the opportunity to help Miriam, one of Incarnate Word´s long term Missionaries, polish her application to the Irish government for funding for her project here in Santa Fe and in the Distrito Federal.  I ended up learning a lot about the Santa Fe community, problems and all, based on the first 75 of Miriam´s interviews and observations of my own.

Social disintegration and inequality is readily apparent if one only has the time to spend a few days walking the littered streets of the pueblo, or chances to wander ten or twenty minutes West on Vasco de Quiroga to explore the booming centro commercial with its numerous skyscrapers, first-class mall, and private Ibero University.  Santa Fe, as a whole, is truly a microcosm of Latin America – the disgustingly rich uncomfortably close to the very poor.  Look west and you have all the amenities and obsessions of ¨first world¨ modern life; look East and you immediately become witness to urban decay, poverty and quiet violence and chaos.  Trash and refuse line the streets and sidewalks, aside the remains of last night´s fix of household cleaner and metal crosses that mark the place where someone´s friend, husband, son was murdered.  Posters of missing persons are common, and homeless or uncared for dogs wander the streets looking for a scrap of food to fill their emaciated bodies.  Police cars and persons frequent the many neighborhoods and always seem busy.  Almost everyone has a second hustle (or only hustle, as the case may be), selling candy, fruit, clothes out of their home, in the market or on a street corner just to make an extra peso.  And generally, there are a lot of people hanging around with apparently nothing to do but watch city life and the numerous ambulances go by.  And yet contrary to logic, this ¨unreal city¨ carries on and people seem generally content, and dare I say, happy.  Truly, they know how to celebrate, praise and pray, unlike anything I´ve ever experienced before in my ¨first world¨ bubble.  

These clues point to the most pressing problems here in Santa Fe of addictions, unemployment, overcrowding, domestic violence and a sense of hopelessness.  One particular question Miriam asked me to ponder for the application was "what are the ¨root causes¨ of all this social disintegration in Santa Fe?"  At first I kind of laughed and thought to myself, ¨yeah,  I´ll get to that right after I solve the questions of the root causes of world poverty, ethnic conflicts, and racism...!?"  However, after throwing ideas around with Emma and Miriam, checking Born in Blood and Fire, a book from a Latin American history class I once took, and scribbling down some mingled ideas taken from some beloved philosophy, theory, literature and history gurus at my alma mater, as well as some serious re-thinking and editing, I came to these - probably incorrect or imprecise - conclusions.

The principal causes of the present social disintegration include the four following factors: the colonial history of Mexico, capitalism and subsequent hyper-urbanization, government corruption and impunity. 
The violence of the initial conquest of Mexico and the hierarchical colonial regime provided a space for agrarian capitalism and now neo-liberalism to do grave social destruction. The government neglects and/or is not able to maintain the pace of construction of infrastructure and social services necessary to accommodate the mass influxes of people who can no longer make a living in the countryside. In addition, the acceleration of chaotic urbanization does not provide the construction of social solidarity networks. Coupled with these factors are widespread impunity and government corruption at every level. In this environment, social disintegration is inevitable as people increasingly disregard the community at large and turn more and more to themselves for survival.

So how does that translate to the lives of the people of Santa Fe and what does it mean?  To be honest, I don’t know, but Emma and I had a very interesting encounter on our Christmas day running up and down the infamous barranca of the town.  Right next to the daycare in which we are volunteering, I spotted a hung-over middle-aged man passed out on street, supine and sleeping.  Naturally we were both a bit concerned for his safety, even on this relatively quiet street, and so we approached him.  After failing to try and help him locate his home, and questioning the other passersby about his identity, Emma ran to the nearest aborrotes (small stores) to buy him some water and cookies as he babbled to me about some crook of a politician who wanted thousands of pesos, for who knows what.  To me, these near first words out of his mouth, upon waking up out of his drunken stupor, were very interesting.  I think the tendency is sometimes to classify, think of, or label ¨the poor¨ as ignorant, and not actors or thinkers in their own life or destiny, or in worse case scenarios, as the cause of their own condition. But this man´s witness to me speaks of a depressing hopelessness, if not a recognized debility in his present situation, not of his ignorance or cause of his own low social ´condition,´ whatever it is.  Of course, no blanket statements can be given, but in fact, my experience over this Christmas season would speak the opposite truth. 

Let me speak on this injustice for a minute: Emma´s mom came to visit a few days after Christmas and we went to the Zocalo (or centre square) of this mammoth city to do a bit of site seeing.  I had heard about this from a friend, but the absurdity of the government´s expenditure on the following absolutely blew me away with its conspicuity as I gazed on it in person. Since 2007, the government in collusion with Coca Cola has sponsored a one month winter wonderland, including an outdoor skating rink the size of an American football field (alone costing the $1.5 million per season), a snowmobile zone, a tobogganing hill and snowman-making workshop for the more artistically inclined.  This is a city blanketed in fog, whose daily average temperature in these months runs between 60 and 80 degrees.  Don´t get me wrong, the Calderon government has done its fair share of band-aid social charity, which may be more than can be said for his predecessors.  He has opened up comedors (soup kitchens) with cheap or free meals, and provided free medical attention and a food allowance for those over 68.  He has provided this, that is, for who are able to negotiate the system by way of a gross amount of paperwork and potentially dehumanizing consultations with social workers. 
All the while, the system that keeps people in poverty remains in effect.  Calderon publicly supports trade liberalization, privatization and market control of economy – an economy by and for the rich.  In fact, it´s both beautiful and sad to say that a group of youth at the parish actually did relatively more with available resources than the government has for its people this Christmas.  In less than a few days, some friends of mine organized a humble gift drive to distribute clothes, toys and candy to child street venders in one of the numerous Distrito Federal colonias (zones).

In all of the beauty and frustration of this new experience of Christmas, where am I left?  What do I do?  As Incarnate Word Missionaries, our mission statement is the following:  We, the missionaries, inspired by the charism and mission of the Incarnate Word, choose to live in community and walk in solidarity with the economically poor and marginalized, in order to be transformed by them and to transform unjust social structures that keep people economically poor and marginalized.  How am I supposed to begin this process of transformation in the face of such poverty, violence, and structural injustice, meanwhile channeling my own anger and impotency into something positive?  I can only answer humbly: to start a journey with the people who have become my family away from home in their struggles, joys and most importantly their incredible hope for a better tomorrow.  My personal hope is that I take this first step in humility, both carefully and prayerfully. Thank God for the millions of others working daily to make this world a better place, and for my many role models, both famous and unknown, who daily remind me why I am still here.  Thank God I know I am not alone.  We are not alone.